The Circle of Milk

I share your pain, Matt. It’s one thing to mourn the loss of a celebrity who we barely knew, but having your milk expire is a truly traumatic life event. To think that it happened right in your refrigerator. Can you ever sleep in there again?

What you’re missing here is the big picture. There’s an elegant balance to everything. When something dies, something else is also born. The writer of the song “Circle of Life,” from the Lion King, was on the right track about this. The Circle of Life is where you’re born, you grow up, you try to change your identity and move out of state to escape some bad loans, but your mother, who was the co-signer on the loans, hunts you down and roundly beats you with a sack of oranges. In other words, things tend to come back around. The Circle of Life that Elton John sang about was not the same thing. He was singing about Louie Anderson.

But there’s something more poetic, and that’s the Circle of Milk. Did you know that on the same day your milk died, a single cow in Wisconsin gave birth to 6.5 gallons of the same stuff? And that was in Wisconsin. Imagine how much milk was made by the cows living right next to you in Brooklyn.

I found this diagram which graphically represents all the phases in the great Circle of Milk:

I admit, the Circle of Chocolate Milk probably would have been a little easier to see. Still, it’s pretty amazing.

Drew Dernavich is a cartoonist. He has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2002 and has published over two hundred and fifty cartoons.

The ace pilot leading Virgin Galactic’s billion-dollar quest to make commercial space travel a reality.

Asian-Americans, a largely made-up group united by historical marginalization, are desperate for a movie like this one to be perfect, because the opportunity to make another might not arrive for another quarter century.